I need to bring this out in the open, as I have lots of complaints from a lot of irritated members, with whom I and the other Admins and Moderators quite agree with.

Let me give you a brief history of what I am trying to say here, earlier when we had member rankings like Senior Aquarists etc., a number of people would run up their post counts with postings like " Great", "Cool", "I've PMed You", "You Have PM" etc., and get an automatic ranking as their post counts went up. With the new version of IAH we completely changed the rankings that are automatically assigned and the posts from these very same members drastically dropped. Sorry, we cannot make any other inference here but this.

Unfortunately this trend continues till today with single line stuff like "You have PM", "I've Pmed you" "Check your PM" "great", "cool" etc being posted in the forums.

This is bad for IAH as a whole.

1. It violates the spirit of IAH and those genuinely interested in the Topics posted on IAH.
2. It wastes the time of every member interested in a thread in this forum.
3. It wastes systems resources emailing subscription notices for this forum for people who want an e-mail notification whenever a new reply is posted.
4. It wastes the Admins and Moderators time, where they have to repeatedly check the forums for scrutiny, maintenance and deletion of double posts.
5. It wastes our bandwidth resources.

This is a request to all members not to post messages like - You have PM, and others I have detailed above and co-operate.
IAH would not have become what it is without the active contribution of members in the forums, but these kind of posts mentioned above do not help IAH or it's members in anyway, nor do they contribute to the wealth of information on IAH.

This is a friendly request and I hope all members will abide by it. Any further posts like the above will not be tolerated by Admins and Mods, and I request all members to help us police against such posts.

I wholly agree with you sir.The above said is something that has been at its brink for a while now.In a way i feel it was good that the rankings were changed when the system was being upgraded,not only because the posts by some members drastically dropped but also because,i personally feel,you cannot refer to a person as a senior aquarist or aquarium guru just because he has posted those many number of times.For instance,knowing my knowledge and limited info that ive got in this hobby in my few years,i realise that theres no way i could be called an aquarium guru or a senior aquarist nor can some very experienced aquarists here with just 20-50 posts be known as a newbie or junior aquarist....It takes years of experience to become a good aquarist and not just a 1000 posts on a portal.This.....is just my opinion

For a few forums the names like trevor, aquadip2000, aquascapes are mentioned as moderators.

I will do a good revamp and get all the moderators names mentioned or assign them the rank, I need sometime for all this, anyway I'll get down to that soon, instead of having individual set of moderators for each forum I feel we should continue with the batch of moderators who share the work like now.

Yes, Its about time we enforced some discipline on IAH. We should and will be very strict from now on.
I request long time members to inform me if they come across the above mentioned unwanted posts.

I also request all members to avoid SMS and write in proper English to the best of their ability. You do not impress anyone with your slang. A little effort will help all.
Enjoy the hobby and your membership of IAH and make the best use of this useful website.

Banning the person in case of a violation sounds good for a start up and i also agree with the purpose of using a proper language rather than the sms style of posting.Something probably also needs to be done about the fact that many users just sign up these days to post in the LFS section for buying and selling rather than actively participate in the forum.

This thread probably needs to be made sticky or put up in the announcements section so that everybody gets to read it and be aware of it

or may be make a new thread and post about all the rules and regarding the violations if breached so that whoever signs up new and the existing members read it before they start posting.

many users just sign up these days to post in the LFS section for buying and selling rather than actively participate in the forum

Very true...

Please try to make some modification in LFS announcement & Buy / sell / exchange forum, something like password protected for every new users or something like a auto decetable to check user rating & post no. So new member cant start any thread in these forum, he can only read & post his comments on this.

New members can only use this forum after having some numbers of post.

So none of new IAH memeber can use it but if in some case, somehow he/she want to use it then he have to take a special permit/password from admins/moderators.

Asking for a certain minimum number of Posts before a person is allowed to use the Buy/Sell/Exchange forum is a good one, but then again you'll have these fellows trying to run up the required number of posts by posting frivolous stuff.

Secondly asking a genuinely interested person to wait for 100 odd posts or say 6 months before posting in the Buy/Sell/Exchange forum is penalising the innocent.

This kind of regulation needs to be incorporated in the software, which I don't think is possible now, however we can do something about it but it'll take a while.

How about Selling be only allowed in the LFS Announcements, for hobbyists we can restrict to Buy/Exchange. Bad Idea????, Yes looks bad. IAH is all about hobbyists right?

Anyway for now as long as the "You have PM" "wow" "cool" etc., posts stop it will be a blessing.

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